


Give me your love, it's a curious love

by dasyatidae



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: 2013, AU - millenials, Crack, I'm sorry for this and also kind of embarrassed, M/M, Mess, POV First Person, Tentacle Sex, aliens who only eat sandwiches, au - aliens, from Arthur's POV, inception bingo!, kinda gregg araki-ish stuff going on, life in your early 20s, making it work, messy food porn, silent Eames is a strange Eames indeed, soul mate hunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 17:29:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11673789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dasyatidae/pseuds/dasyatidae
Summary: Mal and Arthur learn that their boyfriends are both aliens!!!!!!!!





	Give me your love, it's a curious love

**Author's Note:**

> For my “food porn” square! Bonus tentacle kink. Okay, so this was an original story that I actually submitted to a genre writing workshop _dear god what what what is my problem_ several years ago. I never really liked it as such, but I’ve been wanting to adapt it as A/E fic for some months now, and inception bingo has finally motivated me. :D D: D: 
> 
> Um, beta’d by those poor souls in my writing workshop and my friend M. >.>
> 
> Title snagged from Slowdive's new track, "Slomo."

I am convinced that one day I will see my soulmate through a bus window, or on a bicycle, or missing a flight at an airport. He’ll be hurrying by but in that split second there will be a feeling of recognition—a bubbling, welling gladness and sense of place. Maybe I just like having a reason to attend out the window, and I’d rather count blondes than play the license plate game. I never imagine what I would _do_ if I saw my soulmate, how I would approach him, a mad dash down city streets or anything like that. This a fantasy about—PING!—instant knowing. That’s why it’s impossible, I guess—not because soulmates don’t exist, but because you can never be sure about another person ever. In fact, when I look closely at these passers-by, handsome brunettes in button downs, guys with cute tattoos, scraggly dudes that look like the unrequited love of my early-mid-twenties, I can’t see anything I recognize. In moments like these—honest moments—I doubt myself. I think I could survey the human race and never know my soulmate at a bus stop, across a room. But at other times—well, like I said, the fantasy is entertaining. Compelling.

So when I found Eames, I didn’t know what to do. I’m not saying that Eames is my soul mate. Sometimes, when he uncurls a roll of sushi and disassembles it grain by grain into a pulp upon his plate, I think Eames does not have a soul. His eyes, certainly, don’t have that white glimmer I was taught to fleck pupils with in art class. And they say that whole thing about eyes being windows.

I didn’t know what to do with Eames when I found him, partly because he was bleeding slightly from his mouth. I was doing some night running—sprinting as fast as I could go, which my neighborhood sometimes inspires me to do. A BMW tore around the corner ahead of me, and somebody screamed, “YOU RUN FAST!”—not a cat call I’m used to receiving. I collided with Eames then. He was standing by the trash can, holding a fake California ID and a pair of Adidas sneakers in his hands. I almost mistook him for an unsavory character, but the house behind us was having a party, spilling smokers out over the porch and onto the street. A band was getting ready for their set; I could hear screeching tuning, chanting from a crowd in the backyard. At second glance, Eames was a muscular guy with bizarre tattoos and a nonchalant slouch. In the dark, his face looked delicate like a skull. Mal says he looks strange even in full light, but I immediately liked the beautiful ridge of his nose, his compassionate eyebrows, his obscenely plush, curving lips. He is very geometric, which I like. I was afraid he was hurt, but he smiled and ducked his head like he was trying not to laugh with so much warmth that the blood trickle jiggled and fell off his stubbly chin, and I _knew_ he wasn’t a bruiser. He was just the nicest guy’s guy, probably, like he had gotten clocked defending a buddy or having a joke argument about Call of Duty or something like that. He poked my track jacket to say he thought I was cute, and we shared a couple cigarettes. I have never been that into online dating—too many weirdos—but I know the ropes from all those _New York Times_ Death of Dating exposes, and I know you’re not supposed to take home a strange guy the first time you meet, before you know if he has friends you relate to and a normal job. I took Eames down to the bottom of the city instead, to our harbor, and we sat where we didn’t have to look at the city across the Bay, just at the little boats and the land too close across the water. It was manageable. When we kissed, his sandpaper tongue grated my lips until I was bleeding too. Then I brought him home, despite _The New York Times_. We have been pretty happy ever since. And we were even blindly happy for six months, before my best friend Mal made things weird.

 

About six months into my relationship with Eames, my best friend Mal started having a bad time partying. Four weekends in a row I was summoned from porch chats by frantic texts to hold the bathroom door for her, to frown down everyone who needed to pee so Mal could sob on the edge of a bathtub in semi-privacy.

“It’s Dominic,” she finally confessed.  

“What?” I asked, surprised. Dom had looked perfectly normal a few minutes before in the yard. He and Eames were making some underage girls squeal by swallowing ping pong balls and then coughing them back up whole. Dom had waved his hands at me mid-gag as I retreated into the house, as if to say, _what’s wrong with Mal this time?_

“Dom—he’s—oh, I’m just so—” She made prayer hands and then jammed her running nose between them to muffle a hiccup.

“He’s so what? Did you guys break up?”

“No.”

“Did he hook up with someone else? Or—”

“I just—don’t think he’s human,” she gulped. Her eyes went wide as if this declaration was a surprise to her too, and she caved into herself entirely with weeping.

“Mal, what do you mean? Is he—is he—hurting you?” If he wasn’t human, then he was what, a monster? With giant, wall punching fists? Anger flared up, rollicking, threatening to overwhelm my usual, carefully cultivated calm.

But Mal said, “No! No, he’d never do that.”

“Then what? Somebody else?”

She shook her head, seemed about to speak, and then her face started to tremble, and she was crying again, knuckling fiercely at her smeared mascara. “ _Mon cher,_ I can’t tell you. You’re going to think I’m crazy, that’s all. I guess I don’t care.” She sucked air and calmed slightly, smiled just a smidge—a good sign. “Dom isn’t a normal human person. He’s like a—an alien. Or however you want to say it—he’s not mean or awful or anything, but he’s not a _normal_ person. He doesn’t talk, like ever.”

I waved this away. “Eames doesn’t either.”

“No, really. Like I have never heard him say a fucking word, actually. I was talking about it with Ari. I don’t think anybody has—”

I paused, unsure of how serious or ridiculous Mal’s accusation was. Mal and Dom had been together for an astronomically long time, longer than me and Eames, a year at least. I had been sure she enjoyed his squinting and his inarticulate, laconic grunting more than actual speech. She was annoyingly enthusiastic about Dom, always inappropriately gripping his biceps and showering him with French endearments in public. And Dom seemed to reciprocate; he fawned over Mal, always opened doors for her, lifted whatever heavy objects were around for no rational reason, presumably to impress her. Yet he popped his collar defensively when any of Mal’s friends walked into the room, as if they might go for his throat with their teeth.

“So he’s not really a communicator—” I ventured, needing to say something.

“Communicator!” She sniffed. “You know, when I met him, I really _found_ him. In the CVS parking lot. He was just standing there by a trash can. He wasn’t even waiting for a prescription. I think he was holding trash, Arthur. Actual trash.”

“Uh huh.”

“That was like a flag, you know—a red warning flag—wasn’t it? The trash? I shouldn’t have brought him home. But he was so haa-aaandsome,” she cried.

Dom looked like a squinty block of wood. I had always assumed theirs was a pheromonal attraction. “You know, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t want to say you’re overreacting, because you’re upset, so there must be something upsetting going on. It’s hard when someone disappoints you, isn’t as social—or as comfortable holding space for your feelings—or—stuff—as you might want. But Dom not being a human? Isn’t that a little, I don’t know, mean? I mean, I’m not saying you’re _being_ mean, you know, because you’re just having your feelings. But don’t you think he’s probably just from New England or something?”

Mal gave me an aloof, uncomprehending look and did not deign to pretend that I was saying helpful things instead of floundering. It was stupid, but I was starting to feel a smidge uneasy, thinking of my own silent, nearly dumpstered boyfriend, all of the sudden picturing Dom and Eames having slightly aggressive staring contests for awkwardly long amounts of time at parties, ignoring other people. Dom and Eames choking sadly together on yellow birthday cake, but then making cake and ice cream sandwiches and finally enjoying the cake gleefully together. The time my dog Ibex started licking Dom’s face, and Eames and Dom started licking Ibex, like actually grooming him, for too long to be a joke. And Mal’s father Miles was there, and he got really upset and yelled at them, and they all three got the exact same chagrined look.

Also I remembered all the happy hours and brunches and late night car rides home from the city that Mal and I had chattered through in one, sustained, high pitched, squeeing shriek while Eames and Dom sat silently, playing with calculators, tuning into empty radio frequencies, changing lanes suddenly without using the blinker. Why didn’t either of them own phones? Wallets? Socks? I started to feel worried.

Then Mal grabbed my knees with her viper fang fingernails and got even more godforsakenly solemn, her treble clef voice dropping unusually low.

“And also, Arthur,” she said. “His dick, it’s not a real dick.”

“ _What?_ ” I demanded.

“It’s not a real dick—it’s—it’s—IT’S THE LEG OF AN OCTOPUS!” Here she began to weep again.

I leaned back against the door, nearly crunching it shut on the fingers of some poor girl trying to claw her way to the toilet. Poor Mal, sitting there sobbing full force like a teenage breakup. Poor me: all my anxiety and patient counseling for nothing. She really was losing it.

 

But the next week, I saw Eames’s tentacle cock.

The night started out normally enough. We were sitting on my bed, watching History Channel documentaries about natural disasters in the classical world, constructing spaghetti and sashimi sandwiches out of take-out containers precariously balanced on our laps: an unusual food combination, but one that Eames invariably adored. Eames and I would take turns holding a sashimi fish slab in hand, glopping noodles on top of it, and then cramming the noodle-shedding monstrosity into the other’s gaping mouth. On screen, the narrator panned across mosaics of ancients cowering under descending clouds of Vesuvius ash. In bed, Eames upended a white box on my chest and made a blood red cut of tuna squiggle down my stomach in pursuit of the trickling pasta, until I felt like Liv Tyler and laughed. I pulled Eames down on top of me, and his weight ground our mess, made us sopping and slimy, totally gross.  

As he sucked and slurped noodles away from my collarbones, I licked wrist to fingertips and reached for him, drizzling spit across my own stomach as I pushed under the elastic of his boxer shorts to palm his hardness, to use the tip of him to trace my heart line, fate line, and long life line—everything but the brain line, the line of logical decisions. Eames undid the remaining buttons of my shirt with his teeth—the only way he seems to know how to do buttons—and puckered his lips against my nipples, encountering them, as always, with delighted astonishment.

I rolled on top of him and shuffled down to lick the food from his skin, leaving him slick with my spit—slid on top of him—and began to work myself open. Leaning, I could kiss his eyebrows, the corners of his pretty, green eyes. He flicked his gaze to mine almost shyly, and relaxed. I could feel his muscles lose just a shadow of tenseness I had not detected before. I had my arms around him, and—yeah, I don’t know, it’s the best way to describe it—he _relaxed_. Even went soft—or it seemed like soft—except—I was still with astonishment, as I realized his dick was undulating inside me.

I scrambled back and looked down. There it was, exactly as Mal had said, the leg of an octopus, carmine and flourishing, covered punk rock in sucker studs that were little, pale mouths. The tentacle was my arm’s length at least, and covered in a pea soup that I knew from the taste of it had to be jizz. Alien jizz—I could have fainted. Eames didn’t notice the change at first. He was smiling at the ceiling, scratching his tattooed chest. When he looked down, he got the dog’s chagrined expression again, cleared his throat, and then sat up to peck my eyebrow in such a play at normalcy that I almost rolled my eyes. I found I was doing this manic giggling thing instead that I swear I have _never_ done before or since.

“Um, I have to pee,” I said. I struggled through a sheet tangle to escape. In the bathroom mirror, I stared at my tomato-sauce-pea-soup smeared thighs and wrung my hands like I had seen people do in movies, muttering _fuck fuck fuck fuck,_ oddly tearless.

 

For that whole first week after I saw his tentillum, I was petrified, horrified, suspecting Eames of impregnating me with super intelligent earthworms or sucking my brain out my ears in tiny bits while I slept. I watched him closely when he stood near my spider plants and nasturtiums, waiting for vines to wriggle out from his nostrils, from the dimples where his nipples and bellybutton are supposed to be.

But slowly I realized that I knew Eames and how to be with him. The tentacle cock was new, but everything else—our brunching and face slurping, our slam dancing and walks to the dog park—was clockwork, a fitted leather glove. And even the tentacle cock couldn’t be too scary for a guy who had beasted stick shift driving in the space of a single morning. Honestly, I feel so _relieved_ that Eames’s eccentricities are lodged in his space DNA, are not mine to smooth out or change. I don’t have to make him into a better boyfriend or a relatable person. It’s special, not gross, that he only eats chocolate, sandwiches, and pickled things. Once I made him a nutella sandwich and his eyes gooed over in happiness—it’s kind of endearing, once you get used to it, a bubbling cascade of fluffy white, more soaplike than cumlike, like suds the foaming brush spews at the coin car wash.

I’m used to Eames in his entirety now—I really think I am—yet I am ashamed to this day that for months I never noticed his silence. Me! I’m a great listener. I’ve listened to old people tell stories about their childhoods for hours, about persevering through hardship and smearing lard on toast for supper. For me, love has always been words. I guess I had so much to say to Eames, I never noticed he had no words. When I think back to our best conversations, it’s always me monologuing about something—the need to deprivilege marriage, how awesome _High Fidelity_ is, the myriad ways my parents are unsuited to be each other’s companions in old age. I felt that Eames was really answering me. His huge, opalescent irises are reassuring; they smooth away my agitation like a firm hand run down the back of a bristling dog.  

Sometimes we look at each other, and my mind fuzzes. I lose track of time. That silly, saccadic way of staring into someone’s eyes—where you look first into one eye, and then into the other, and see him jumping back and forth gazing at you too, making what we imagine as a sustained, strong act a series of starts and stops, so self-conscious—that doesn’t happen with us. Somehow his left eye locks to my right eye, his right eye to my left, and I’m all with him. The sensation is kaleidoscopic; I get the same pulsing pressure at the bridge of my nose that I do when I try meditating, or when I did hypnosis to quit smoking. Last Thursday afternoon we zoned out like this on my bed in the middle of making phonebook poetry collages. I said, “I have to pee,” got up, looked around, and it was ten o’clock at night.

“Did we fuck?” I wondered, shaking out my ears as if to clear water. My head was filled with opinions on books, the West Bank barrier, Moral Perfectionism—my ideas, and Eames’s, like we had been Discoursing about shit for hours.

Eames brought a phonebook to his lips and delicately tore out a page with his teeth, an unfortunate habit he has picked up from the dog. But I was hungry too. We went to get sandwiches, and Eames slid his feet out of his shoes under the table, grabbed my shin bone with his toes affectionately as we slurped and spooned.

Yes, I like Eames, tentacle and all—

Mal, on the other hand, is having a hard time moving on. That is, she can’t decide which to move on from, her disappointment or Dom. She mopes around campus coffee shops—entirely new terrain for her, as far as I know—and texts her sisters about their cousin’s August wedding, bridesmaid dresses, food trucks versus formal catering, color schemes. She insists she won’t bring Dom, that he has no place at an old fashioned human ceremony of commitment, something his species has probably not evolved to understand. She says this loudly and often in front of us, making Dom bleep with shame.

“Mal is being a prude,” I murmur to Eames under our quilt. He is sad for his friend, I can tell—his eyes have turned into big commas—and he wraps his tentacle several times around my wrist and tugs.

Poor Mal. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it a happy horse, I guess. Eames’s skin laps against my skin, little shifts in space—I a pebble shore, he the reservoir fingers, not an ocean because tideless; we will touch and touch, and he will never pull back from me. Strong noon light seeps through the blanket, mottling our skins with purple and gray. When Eames pushes his fingers into me to pet and probe all my hidden skin, it’s like this part of me is his suckered muscle, turned inside out.

Sometimes I feel sad, watching the moles on his back rearrange themselves early in the morning, when I should still be asleep. New patterns every few minutes—if I flutter my lashes I can almost catch the freckles’ drift. I haven’t seen many alien movies—I found ET boring, fell asleep—but everyone knows aliens don’t stick around forever, that they beam back up, are reclaimed. They’re visitors, destined to return Home somewhere when whatever solar wind blew them in shifts. Eames might even explode into chunks of meat and squelching eels one day while I am cooking him pancakes, while we are at a birthday Mac n’ Cheese pot luck, I don’t know.

It’s okay though. My pup Ibex will live out his doggy years and die on the rug one day too, and maybe I will get cancer from breathing in all this freeway soot, from staying too long in my house beside the harbor. I write down my daily nothings in my Moleskin to keep my memories from disintegrating like VHS tapes. I plan out the outfits I will wear to Mal’s parties while I run through my neighborhood, studying the bikers and the camero drivers’ faces.

On the bus, to my fantasies of instant soul mate recognition, I add surprise twists.

 

 


End file.
